New Orleans and the Birth of Jazz

Blog Entry 1: New Orleans and the Birth of Jazz

When slaves were to America from Africa, they brought with them distinct African cultural traditions in music and dance.  These traditions, combined with other influences specific to New Orleans and this point in history, produced jazz at the start of the 20^th century. 

New Orleans has a long and multi-faceted historical connection to African music and cultural tendencies that distinctly encouraged and guided the development of jazz.  In this entry, I will discuss the qualities of New Orleans that created jazz music beginning with Congo Square and ending with the emergence of legends like Buddy Bolden and Jelly Roll Morton.

New Orleans’ unique conditions that would later allow the development of jazz began before Louisiana was even American territory.  The main distinction between New Orleans in the eighteenth century and other American cities, was the French and Spanish rule and their differing viewpoints on the status of slaves.  Catholic French and Spanish settlers believed that slaves had souls that could be saved which differed from the American understanding of slaves as property, and therefore not human (Stewart).  This differentiation allowed a relatively more liberal environment in New Orleans in which allowed slave culture and African musical tradition to, at times, exist openly. An example of this was Congo Square, where on Sundays slaves were allowed to play traditional African instruments, sing, and dance.  This was perhaps one of the first occurrences of “syncretism”, the merging of features from different cultures that were previously separated. Gioia claims that historical accounts of Congo Square “provide us with a real time and place, an actual transfer of the totally African ritual to the soil of the New World” (Gioia, 4).  As he asserts that these purely African traditions played a significant role in fostering jazz, Gioia is also clear that the “the Latin-Catholic culture, whose influence permeated nineteenth-century New Orleans, benignly fostered the development of jazz music…the music and dances of Congo Square would not have been allowed in the more Anglicized colonies of the Americas”(Gioia, 6).  Without the more Europeanized view of slaves that allowed for outlets like Congo Square to exist, African musical traditions would not have combined with other factors to create jazz.

Some of the principles of African music can still be noticed in jazz music.  One of these qualities is Ephebism: the power that comes from youth.  This youthful energy is apparent when African dancers “step inside rhythms which are young and strong and to this extent their bodies are generalized by vital rhythmic impulse.”(Thompson, 7).  This African youthful “swing”, is also present in jazz music which was most popular with young people when it began. Young people enjoyed jazz because of its loose and improvisational qualities.  Such characteristics, especially syncopation, can be traced back trough African roots as well, as “African style art and music forms are enlivened by off-beat phrasing of the accents”(Thompson, 10). 

The one factor that is perhaps most important in the development of jazz was the presence of black Creoles in New Orleans. Creoles were racially mixed Europeans who identified more with their white ancestors. After post-Civil War reconstruction, Creoles were viewed as black and viewed the same as other black former slaves and port workers.  These Creoles were technically trained in European classical music.  When they began taking classical melodies and syncopating them, they created Ragtime.  This music was another example of cultural syncretism as whites took Ragtime music and channeled it into minstrelsy. Gioia argues that along with work songs and the development of the blues, “Minstrel music presents a rather confoluted situation: a black imitation of a white caricature of black music exerts its influence on another hybrid form of African and European music (Gioia, 8).  Without the influence of the Creoles and their variations on the classic European melodies, jazz would not have existed.

Similarly, work songs originated during the days of slavery and later prompted The Blues.  When jobs at the New Orleans port became available after reconstruction, many blacks moved to live and work in a more liberal city.  They brought with them the sound of the blues.  The combination of the blues and ragtime birthed jazz.  This combination could only have been possible in a city such as New Orleans in which the diversity of people and tradition created a “gumbo” that, similar to jazz, was made up of many specific yet essential influences. 

Racial Factors of The Swing Era

As jazz entered the mainstream in the 1930’s, more white bandleaders and critics began to emerge.  Race became an explicit subject matter during the “Swing Era” due to the popularity of the music, its newfound availability to whites, and the revolutionary popular front that taught anti-racism as an extension of the communist ideology.  These developments led to race dialogues being publicized across the country and not just within black communities.

The popularization of jazz across racial borders began in Chicago when white musicians like the Austin High Gang dared to enter black jazz venues in the South side and attempted to replicate the music they heard there. This imitation started to popularize jazz within white communities.  Though the appropriation of jazz angered many black musicians who weren’t getting credit for their innovations, the invention of the radio in the early 1930’s provided opportunity. When listeners all across the nation began to enjoy and appreciate jazz over the radio, white audiences could not distinguish between white and black musicians (Gioia, 129). Radio created an important desegregated national stage for the further popularization of jazz.

Still, spaces in which musicians performed were still extremely racially divided..  Competition was a key asset in sparking racial dialogue in the 30’s.  As black and white bandleaders and musicians populated New York, the question emerged as to which race played better jazz music.  This question was actualized in 1937 when Benny Goodman’s band battled Chick Webb’s on the stage of the desegregated Savoy club in Harlem.  This event was important because most people in attendance thought that Webb beat Goodman’s band in terms of playing better swing.  This proved that black jazz was comparable if not better than jazz played by whites.

The inequity of opportunity for blacks to book higher-brow venues persisted.  Although Webb had beaten the “King of Swing” in a desegregated black space which opened its doors to whites attending the competition, black musicians like Webb still were unable to book high-brow venues which still booked shows according to lines of race and class rather than musical talent.  An example of this was Goodman’s performance at Carnegie Hall in 1938.  Even after being shown up at the Savoy a year earlier, Goodman still had the privilege of playing the first jazz show at Carnegie because he was white (Gioia, 142).  What started as an issue for blacks getting cheated out of their music in seedy South Side clubs of Chicago publically took the main stage in the 1930’s.  Mainstream media also responded to the question of race’s role in the music.  A musical tradition that had previously been looked down upon by most whites was now written about by emerging white jazz critics like John Hammond. Hammond explicitly commented on the dialogue between whites and blacks within the context of jazz. This created a duality between the white critic and the black musician “because the majority of jazz critics are white middlebrows, most jazz criticism tends to enforce white middle-brow standards of excellence as criteria for performance of a music that in its most profound manifestations is completely antithetical to such standards” (Jones, lecture slides).

The white jazz critic was a product of the popular-front political movement happening at the time.  The Swing Era happened at the same time as the Great Depression.  Simultaneously, the Soviet Union’s dedication to Communism was appealing to those frustrated with America’s Capitalist system.  The Communist party in America saw anti-racism as similar to anti-fascism, one of the cornerstones of the communist party.  Thus, the Popular Front fostered radical white Leftists who learned anti-racism through “an appreciation of black culture and history” (Lecture, 2.14.13).  This produced white allies of blacks and their culture like Hammond who had trouble navigating racial issues with his writing because he was affiliated though not fully embedded in the same reality as the black musician (Stewart, 2.14.13).  

The Development of Jazz in the Harlem Crucible

The dialogue between music and society in New York during the 1920’s resulted in not just the culture of Harlem affecting jazz, but the music influencing the social and spatial development of the city (Bakhtin).  The key quality that differentiated New York’s jazz from Chicago’s was the existence of multiple different cultures and social and economic conditions within the black community. The combination of affluent and lower-class blacks sharing the same space in addition to the new commercialization of jazz paved the road for dualities in jazz music and culture that were unique to New York.  These dualities included the development of both “hot” and “cool” styles, through the forms of both piano-based stride and big-band ensembles, in spaces varying from Harlem rent parties to dance halls. These competing forces existed in black Harlem because it concentrated many different components of black life in a spatial crucible of modern New York (Survey Graphic, 630). Similar conditions did not exist in Chicago, which in comparison fostered a very unified black community, highly segregated in the South Side, in which mostly black industrial workers made up the audience for jazz. 

            After World War I, 150,000 blacks moved to New York from along the East Coast (Stewart). Blacks moving North from Carolina brought with them “ring shout” gospel music. Affluent blacks who had resided in Harlem since before the war favored European ragtime music.  The combination of these elements produced “stride piano” which grew out of rent parties in lower-income Harlem and set the foundation for swing music.  Stride had to make all blacks attending rent parties dance, despite their differnet backgrounds and musical tastes. This resulted in musicians like James P. Johnson playing emotive “gutbucket” (Henderson) music that combined European melodies with blues and ring-shout music of the South to create a “hot” improvisational sound specifically on the piano.  Rent parties existed in the lower-brow black communities while the higher-brow members of the literary Harlem renaissance looked down upon jazz and stride because it reminded them of the South they had escaped from in hopes of a better life (Gioia).

            Another development during this time was big band jazz ensembles. “A casual, accidental affair” (Fletcher, 105) for black musicians, jazz dance halls in New York grew on principles of commercialization rather than their equivalents on the South Side of Chicago, which were results of an industry based economy.  While in Chicago the best, “hottest” jazz clubs played for black audiences from similar backgrounds, Harlem big bands played “cool” jazz for either higher brow blacks, or for whites who wanted in on the increasingly popular novelty of black music.  Fletcher Henderson directed the band at the Cotton Club.  When Henderson brought Louis Armstrong to join his band, Armstrong propelled the ensemble to evolve from the classic “cool” sound of legitimate, ragtime-influenced written rhythms to a more free, rolling, improvisational sound with varying rhythms and a new style: swing.  Armstrong brought the same “hot” and “dirty” qualities that appeared in stride piano and jazz from the South to the dance hall big bands, which would later develop into the swing ensembles of the 30’s. Simultaneously, a “cool” jazz style also existed in the arrangements of Paul Whiteman and music of Joe Smith who played “with a legitimate rather than dirty tone, used vibrato sparingly, and couched their solos in an unhurried, reflective manner” (Fletcher, 103-4). 

Hot and cool jazz. High and low-brow blacks. New migrants from the South and long time Harlem residents. Stride piano and big band jazz. White audiences in the dance halls and blacks in rent parties. These dualities within different spaces and cultures distinctly influenced Harlem style jazz.  Similarly, the music that developed out the Harlem crucible came to influence the social, economic, and spatial developments of New York as a city. The symbiotic relationship between music as expression and society as context and space, allowed for a new generation of educated black musicians and arrangers like Johnny Dunn, Joe Smith, and Fletcher Henderson to expertly combine all of these elements in their own crucibles: the big band jazz ensemble.